Month: March 2014

If you have several objects on a slide in your PowerPoint 2013 presentation, they may look messy if they are not lined up. The smart guides that PowerPoint provides are good for helping you line objects up, but they only go so far.

For our example, we’re going to line up four shapes, but the principle holds true for whatever objects you want to align.

Go to the Insert tab and click on Shapes, fine the rectangle shape and click on that.

With the rectangle shape tool active, drag out a rectangle on your slide. Just for the hell of it, let’s put some text in it. Just start typing and your words will appear in the box. Next, select he box by clicking on one of its edges and copy/paste it (ctrl + c, ctrl + v). Notice how the box and text within are duplicated, but the second box is offset a small amount. If you ctrl + v again to paste another box, that one is offset as well.

To align these three boxes, let’s first of all add some vertical space between them. Space them out by moving he second two down a little like this:

Now we need to select all three shapes, and you can do this by holding down the Ctrl key on your keyboard while you click on them. You’ll notice that the cursor changes to a “+” sign when you do this, because you are adding to your selection. Are you having trouble selecting objects?

With all three boxes selected, it’s time to align them. Because you have shapes selected, the drawing tools contextual tab will appear in the ribbon, with the format tab within. That’s precisely the tab we need as there is an Align command in the Arrange group there. Click Align > Align Left.

Hey presto – your shapes are now lined up very neatly like this:

You can align to other orientations too:

left

center

right

top

middle

bottom

distribute horizontally – PowerPoint will space out your selections with equal amounts of space between them horizontally.

distribute vertically – PowerPoint will space out your selections with equal amounts of space between them vertically.